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If your response was an uncomfortable silence and a blank stare as you contemplated the simple bulletpointed list of services you provide (or worse, remembered you don’t have a website at all)...it’s okay. This is a safe space.
It is also, however, an informative space.
A good commercial diesel repair website has many pages. Not just a landing page detailing your glorious history and where you’re located. Ideally, you should have several pages…including an About page, a Location page, a Contact page, and hey, how about separate pages for services and repairs?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, DM, you might be saying. Services AND repairs? Can’t I just…put them all on one page?
You can. But like Dr. Ian Malcolm once said, that doesn’t mean you should.
So…what’s the difference between them?
Do you need both?
Have you seen the muffin man?
Do we always ask this many questions in an introduction?
Friends, we have the answers. Read on and find out for yourself!
WHY DO WE NEED SEPARATE PAGES, ANYWAY?
You want to attract customers, right?
(Duh, Dieselmatic.)
Okay. Then you need to give said customers what they’re looking for. If your customer needs some axle work done, they’re going to search for a shop to do it. They’ll use keywords like “commercial axle repair truck shops near me” or similar variants.
Building pages around those search terms is how you’ll capture those customers. You’re essentially tailoring your site to respond to their specific needs.
So, when we recommend separate pages for services and repairs, what we mean (loosely translated) is to offer customers as many entry points to your shop as possible. To learn more about how, keep reading—we’ll break down (har, har) the differences between service and repair pages.
WHAT IS A SERVICE PAGE?
Your service pages are, not surprisingly, focused around the services your shop offers. The key way to think of services is to understand that they’re not always repairs. For example, DOT inspections are not repairs; they are a service you offer. You might offer a mobile maintenance service so you can go to a customer’s yard and provide oil changes on the spot.
You are segmenting services to make it easier for your customers to find exactly what they need on your website. Create a landing page that provides basic information about the services you offer, then branch it out to individual pages that provide detailed information about your most popular services.
Want to see this kind of segmentation in action? Below is an example image of what a service page could look like:
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WHAT IS A REPAIR PAGE?
Your repair pages highlight exactly what repairs you perform. Similarly to the service situation, we do recommend having a general “repair landing page” that provides light detail about all the repairs your shop does, while also linking out to specific repair pages.
For example: Brake repair.
Your potential customer is searching for “break repair in XYZ.” They land on your general repair page, which includes brakes. They click on it, and are taken to your actual brake repair page, which features information about what causes brake damage or wear and reassurance that your techs can solve the problem.
Because you have brakes listed on your general repair page and its own page, you’re doubling the chances of your ideal customer locating you.
Below you’ll see another example repair page. Your site doesn’t have to look exactly like this, but it will give you a good place to start:
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HOW MANY PAGES DO YOU ACTUALLY NEED?
If you offer 400 services, do you need 400 pages? How do you decide which pages to tackle?
Every website needs a strategy. Remember what we said up top: You want to provide what people are searching for. With that said, if you provide some obscure service (like zerk polishing) that no one is looking for…there’s no need to have it on your website.
But how do you know what people are looking for?
Keyword research. SEO, baby!
(We’ll wait while you glance around nervously.)
There are plenty of tools to help you find out what kind of keywords your ideal customers are using—you can head to Google’s Keyword Planner, for instance, or invest in a program like Semrush. It’ll show you the search volume of each keyword you look for, how it’s trending, additional keyword ideas, and more. When you understand how to use this information, you can build out pages people (again, your customers) will actually search for.
In short: Invest in and build pages around the keywords people are searching for.
(As a side note, a solid digital marketing campaign includes PPC ads attached to various service pages. You’ll be paying for these ads. You do not want to pay for the ads attached to 400 pages, some of which will never get clicks, right? So look, while you might be very proud of your zerk polishing service, you might not need an entire page devoted to it. As Dieselmatic’s Managing Director Nick says, “The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”)
LET US HANDLE THE KEYWORDS FOR YOU
Researching and building out new pages for your shop’s website may seem like a tall order (especially if you don’t have one…or if it’s not in great shape). Do you need to learn a ton of stuff on your own? Do you have to hire an SEO specialist and a web developer?
Hey, it couldn’t hurt. Or, y’know, you could turn to Dieselmatic and let us handle all the heavy lifting. We’ll deal with the research, the building, the tools, the updates…everything. All you have to do is keep turning wrenches.
Sound good? Get in touch. We’ll put the pedal to the heavy-duty marketing metal!
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